Pauli Brattico

• University School for Advanced Studies - IUSS Pavia

Finnish nonfinite clauses constitute a complex grammatical class with a seemingly chaotic mix of verbal and nominal properties. Thirteen nonfinite constructions, their selection, control, thematic role assignment, nonfinite agreement, embedded subjects, and syntactic status were targeted for analysis. An analysis is proposed which derives their syn...

This article examines information structure from the point of view of language comprehension. It is argued that correct information structural properties of a discourse-configurational language can be calculated and thus correctly predicted from a formal model if it is assumed that there are two separate processing pathways dealing with linguistic...

Head movement constitutes a controversial topic in linguistic theory. Finnish long head movement exhibits an unusual combination of predicate clefting with A-bar movement instead of V-copying. An analysis is developed on the basis of Roberts (1993, 2010) and Chomsky (2008) that relies on a minimal top-down search algorithm that exists as part of a...

This article explores the phenomenon of pied-piping within the context of two assumptions. The first assumption is that a realistic natural language parser must assign incoming words incrementally into the syntactic representation as it is built during the parsing process. The second assumption is that this process makes use of Merge, the core recu...

Some languages, such as Hungarian and Finnish, utilize information structure (e.g., topic, focus) in their word ordering. Among such languages, subject behavior is often claimed to be related to topicality. This article argues that contrary to the claims made in the previous literature, Finnish does not grammaticalize topics; instead, the alleged t...

1600-luvulla kehitetty tieteellinen menetelmä jakaa länsimaisen historian kahteen ajanjaksoon, moderniin aikakauteen sekä sitä edeltäneeseen esitieteelliseen aikaan. Jälkimmäinen käytti luonnonilmiöiden selittämiseen pääasiassa aristoteelista luonnonfilosofiaa, kun taas ensimmäinen nojaa kokeelliseen ajatteluun. Näiden menetelmien systemaattinen ve...

A well-known tradition in the study of visual aesthetics holds that the experience of visual beauty is grounded in global computational or statistical properties of the stimulus, for example, scale-invariant Fourier spectrum or self-similarity. Some approaches rely on neural mechanisms, such as efficient computation, processing fluency, or the resp...

Finnish finite clause exhibits topic prominence in the sense that the preverbal subject position is occupied by the topic (for example, by the direct object topic), not necessarily by the grammatical subject. Three currently unexplained facts concerning the Finnish free word order phenomenon and topicalization are noted in this paper: subject-verb...

Objective: Mismatch negativity (MMN), a component of the auditory event-related potential (ERP) in response to auditory-expectancy violation, is sensitive to central auditory processing deficits associated with several clinical conditions and to auditory skills deriving from musical expertise. This sensitivity is more evident for stimuli integrate...

A common assumption in linguistic theory is that structural Case assignment constitutes a clause-bound, local dependency. Finnish Case assignment is at odds with any such analysis. Here, structural Case assignment penetrates non-finite clause boundaries, adjunct-adverbial boundaries and even noun heads. What constraints such wild behavior has remai...

One of the two object cases in Finnish, the accusative, has three variants. One of these is a pronoun form similar to the English accusative. The choice between the remaining two forms is based on a number of syntactic properties. Here we show that the correct generalization needs to refer to the agreement features of the noun itself, c-command, an...

This article criticizes recent attempts to explain creative thought as an off-shoot of syntactic mechanisms, such as recursion in language, and proposes an alternative. It agrees with the syntax-centric hypothesis on two fronts. First, it is claimed that a supramodal notion of creative thought, or what paleoarcheologists call human innovativeness,...

Theories of A′-movement can be classified on the basis of how they relate primary movement (movement to the final scope position) to secondary movement (intermediate movement). The standard view maintains that primary movement and secondary movement are motivated and triggered by different grammatical factors. For instance, it can be assumed that p...

Long distance case assignment remains a little studied corner of grammar. This paper documents such phenomenon in Finnish. In this language the choice of the direct object case depends on several local and remote case assigners. Remote case assigners need not occupy the same clause as the assignees: case assignment penetrates any number of non‐fini...

It is well-known that wh-pronouns may pied-pipe their containing host phrases as they move to their final scope positions. In Finnish, such pied-piping requires further that a wh-element is situated at the left edge of host phrases, a position in which it ends up either through base generation or through wh-movement. This article investigates which...

Structural Case assignment, agreement in phi-features, and the EPP-movement are related to each other. However, their exact syntactic relationship remains controversial. The matter is examined here from the point of view of Finnish morphosyntax. Finnish provides close to an ideal language for this purpose, as it has fifteen case forms and full synt...

This paper examines a controversial and particularly complex case phenomenon called quantificational case attested in a number of historically unrelated Slavonic and Finno-Ugric languages, and attempts to establish certain novel cross-linguistic generalizations and conclusions. In particular, it will be argued that (i) instead of standard one-to-on...

The language used by humans is markedly different from the communication systems seen in the animal world. The human brain contains a 'distinguishing factor', which makes it possible for human children to learn natural languages spontaneously, whereas such a feat is not possible for other animals. This article presents an assessment of what such a...

Humans grasp discrete infinities within several cognitive domains, such as in language, thought, social cognition and tool-making. It is sometimes suggested that any such generative ability is based on a computational system processing hierarchical and recursive mental representations. One view concerning such generativity has been that each of the...

It is well-known that grammatical movement is somehow linked to functional heads. There is less agreement on the excact nature of this correlation. According to one view, phrases are moved to the specifier positions of functional heads because functional heads attract them. According to another view, movement is not triggered by functional heads al...

In some languages, nominal case is distributed over several adnominal elements, such as demonstrative pronouns, adjectives, participles, numerals and the nominal head itself. In this article, two hypotheses concerning case distribution are compared. According to the two-part model, case assignment to DPs as a whole (determiner phrases or maximal no...

Listeners attribute a positive or negative value to music. This aesthetic experience is known to be observable over the individuals' entire life span, from early childhood to old age, and in every culture. It is then often concluded that such an aesthetic experience constitutes part of the human nature, having an important biological foundation. Th...

Descartes argued that productivity, namely our ability to generate an unlimited number of new thoughts or ideas from previous ones, derives from a single undividable source in the human soul. Cognitive scientists, in contrast, have viewed productivity as a modular phenomenon. According to this latter view, syntactic, semantic, musical or visual pro...

  In many languages, case is distributed among many grammatical elements inside of argument DPs. This article shows that case distribution in Finnish is sensitive to certain nontrivial structural properties of those DPs. This makes it possible to use case distribution as a tool to investigate the internal structure of a variety of DPs, including no...

The standard view concerning Case assignment or valuation is that Case is valued to determiner phrases (DPs) in syntax. Recently, Kayne has proposed an alternative model, in which Case is valued to lexical elements rather than to phrases. This article cites several facts from Finnish in support of this model. A detailed Kaynean model of Case is dev...

In his recent book The Mind Doesn't Work That Way, Fodor argues that computational modeling of global cognitive processes, such as abductive everyday reasoning, has not been successful. In this article the problem is analyzed in the framework of algorithmic information theory. It is argued that the failed approaches are characterized by shallow red...

Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of inflectional and derivational morphology. The participants were presented with visual sentences containing critical words in which either inflectional, derivational or both rules (combined violation) of Finnish were violated. Inflectional anomalies violat...

The Extended Projection Principle (EPP) has remained a controversial topic in generative grammar. This article proposes to derive the EPP from a generalized theory of nominal case and verbal agreement. According to the proposal presented in this article, morphosyntactic features such as case and verbal phi-features are valued uniformly by the close...

The lexicon is traditionally understood as consisting of lexical items, which are categorized in lexical categories such as verbs, nouns or adjectives. Recently, this assumption has been challenged by a theory which posits no lexical categories in the lexicon. Rather, lexical items are taken to be categorially underspecified roots. This article pre...

In some languages, such as Turkish, Hungarian or Finnish, word formation can be said to be characteristically creative. In these languages, it is quite normal to create novel words by merging several suffixes after the stem. This process may be iterative, allowing recursive stacking of morphemes to the stem. Although it is well-known that in some l...